How many times do you admire and fondle your phone every day? Well, a new study from research firm dscout found that the top 10 percent of extreme cell phone users touch their phones more than 5,400 times daily. The average user spends 145 minutes, while iPhone owners unlocked their phones about 80 times every day, or 6-7 times per hour.
Security researchers at Cisco Talos have discovered a new ransomware variety that claims to encrypt victims’ files, demands ransom, and then purports that any further clicks not related to payment will delete files. But experts say the ransom note posted by the malware, named “Ranscam” is a complete lie. It simply deletes files to pressure victims to pay up, but even if they pay, the files are gone and cannot be restored.
A survey of more than 1,000 people in tech startups in Britain found that three-quarters of respondents fear the business environment may get worse after Brexit, making it harder to attract and retain the best non-UK talent. A third said they will slow down hiring and a little under a quarter will scale back growth ambitions. About half plan to raise funds outside Britain in the next year.
Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.
A Pokémon appears on the screen next to a woman as a man plays the augmented reality mobile game “Pokémon GO” by Nintendo in Bryant Park in New York City, U.S. July 11, 2016. (Reuters)
While you are completely engrossed in the latest gaming craze, Pokémon GO, you should know that the popular game was erroneously granted full access to your Google accounts, including email, Google docs, photos and other stuff. Also noteworthy is the fact that the app does not ask users’ what access they are willing to grant it when they log on using their Google credentials. A fix is in the works. You should also know that the game tracks your every move using your location and other personal data that players are so generously sharing.
Pokémon GO uses augmented reality to superimpose a digital layer on the real world. That has resulted in unintended consequences, from gamers getting injured as a result of walking into objects to getting in trouble for trespassing on private property. But the level of madness surrounding the Pokémon GO phenomenon also raises several real life questions, as AP writer Bryan Nakashima points out.
Singapore has launched a new initiative in partnership with Microsoft to use artificial intelligence technologies for better interactions with e-government services. The project will look for ways to develop the next generation of government services, based on “conversational computing.”
Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.
Social media health communities have been quietly reshaping healthcare as part of a growing trend to raise awareness and empower patients. Some medical professionals caution, however, that these websites might contain inaccurate or unsubstantiated information.
It is the next step in the evolution of social gatherings, but with wider reach. Instead of asking a friend or acquaintance to recommend a good doctor or explain how they are coping with disease, you can connect with a larger online community for all sorts of advice and health-related information.
“The Internet allows these conversations to expand beyond our typical geographic confines and connects us with like people faster than ever before,” said Colleen Young, Community Director at Mayo Clinic Connect. The Mayo Clinic was one of the early adopters of social media channels to further health-related discussion.
Engaging with others in a user community has clear benefits that help patients get more out of their professional health encounters, said Professor Eivor Oborn of Britain’s University of Warwick in an email. Oborn recently did research on the benefits of social media health communities.
There are numerous social health communities, such as Mayo Clinic Connect, Health Unlocked and Mumsnet, to name a few. They all have different purposes, functions, and corresponding limitations. Some are frequented by doctors who answer questions and offer advice. Others are patient-based information exchanges.
Exchanging referral advice for doctors and clinics and personal knowledge about side effects of medications, for example, boosts patients’ confidence in their medical community. It helps them ask more informed questions, and it also narrows the knowledge gap between patients and clinicians.
When the information is accurate, Oborn said it empowers patients to engage in a deeper way with their treatment process so that it “can have important positive impacts.” She cautioned that some of these communities could include misinformation, however, which might be misused for self-diagnosis, or might offer bad advice to patients looking for help.
It is a balancing act between risk and benefit, she added. And her advice is that information from any type of website, particularly an online patient community, “should never replace medical contact, but should serve as an adjunct.”
Nitin Damle, president of the American College of Physicians and a practicing internist, also advised caution when viewing information on social health websites that is not medically substantiated.
While social health communities can be “of value if they do provide accurate information, support groups for patients, and recommend consultation with your internist for further care,” he said some of them might perpetuate the “spread of false information or generate patient anxiety about their medical condition.”
In some cases, “the information is not contextualized and [patients] need to bring their questions and concerns to their internist for proper vetting and accurate information about their particular clinical circumstance,” he said in an email.
Damle, who practices in areas with a high prevalence for Lyme disease, said patients often search the Internet and social media communities for support and more information about this disease, but they sometimes find “the information is inaccurate in regards to testing, patterns of infection, symptoms and diagnoses. This includes ‘chronic Lyme disease,’ which is not recognized in the peer- reviewed medical literature.”
Sometimes, “patients then will come in with many questions, demands for treatment, and misconceptions, which need to be sorted out,” he added.
Young conceded there are concerns among health care providers about the consequences of sharing misinformation through social media. But she said that has provided the Mayo Clinic with an opportunity “to join the conversations and provide evidence-based information to augment information and in some cases, correct misinformation.”
“Social media is ubiquitous and can’t be ignored,” she added. “One doesn’t have to look far these days to find patients and clinicians using social media wisely.”
When approached with caution, Oborn said social media communities enable “new possibilities that can be very positive” and that cannot be achieved through research trials or formal health care systems.
Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.
A new study from the International Labor Organization says more than half of workers in five Southeast Asian countries could lose their jobs within the next two decades as a result of automation. The report warns that nearly 137 million salaried workers from Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are at high risk, particularly those working in the garments industry. Vietnam’s textile industries have been witnessing record investment particularly in robotics, 3-D printing, wearable devices and nanotechnology.
No, it’s not the United States. Named by Wired tech magazine, the world’s most advanced digital society is Estonia. The reason for this distinction is that the former Soviet republic has systematically digitized its government and society in recent years and is now creating new things that are only possible within a digitally-native country.
The use of biometrics for security is becoming more prevalent as passwords and traditional security systems are compromised by hackers. But who protects your fingerprints and other unique biometric identifiers? There are few laws in the U.S., and perhaps the same is true in other parts of the world as well, to safeguard this information. But there are ongoing efforts in the U.S. to set the legal precedent to protect biometric data
Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.
‘Pepper the humanoid robot, designed to welcome and take care of visitors and patients, holds the hand of a new born baby at AZ Damiaan hospital in Ostend, Belgium. June 16, 2016.
You’d think technology is giving developing countries a boost, but it turns out seven countries are getting the most economic and digital return for technological innovation. Those are the United States, Singapore, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Israel, according to a new survey from the World Economic Forum. The survey found individuals driving the digital revolution and a widening infrastructure gap between rich and developing countries.
Several hospitals in different parts of the world are now using robot pets to help care for sick children. According to a global study of children aged 12 years and older, 64 percent of the children polled treated robots the same way they would treat an animal or another person. Some of the hospitals participating in the robot therapy project have incorporated robots into as companions for sick children or facilitators for therapy sessions.
Much like a computer, the human brain needs a network of connections to relay messages from one part of the body to another. In cases of injury, such as spinal cord injuries or speech problems due to strokes, the messages cannot travel back and forth. Now, the U.S.-based Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering is developing a machine learning system that could be used in the future to restore some functions after brain or spinal cord injuries.
Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.
HummingBad is a malicious piece of software that has infected millions of Android devices around the world. The malware earns the hackers who created it around $300,000 a month as a result of false advertisements and fake apps that end up being downloaded by unwary users. The gang is thought to be based in China.
There is no question that there are some people who have grown addicted to the Internet. But author David McCandless suggests obsessive Internet use might lead to some mental disorders. He even created a special website to document them.
The idea of the lone hacker going after some lucrative computer or data system is a thing of the past. Today’s hackers are organized cybercrime gangs that operate like businesses and are increasingly more sophisticated. The Head of Cyber Security at KPMG Paul Taylor argues that the time has come to think differently in order to win this race.
Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.
A teacher talks to children during a therapy class for autistic children in the Guatemalan Association for Autism, Guatemala City, March 13, 2014. (Reuters)
Technology is helping children with Autism Spectrum Disorder break through communication barriers and social isolation. But even as new tools come to the forefront, autism technology needs remain unfulfilled.
Twenty-plus years ago, the idea that autistic children could use computers was viewed more as an impediment than a promise. But today’s machine learning technologies, wearable devices and smartphones have “made an amazing difference in the lives of so many children with autism” and complex communication needs, said Marie Duggan, founder of the non-profit Technology for Autism Now.
“Without technology and what technology has been able to provide to these kids, I believe they are a very misunderstood group of individuals,” she told Techtonics.
Autistic children struggle with communication and social interaction, often needing the aid of flash cards to understand what is being said or conveyed emotionally. In some cases, they have to carry dedicated communication devices that cost thousands of dollars.
Using the same smart devices their peers use minimizes social stigma, said Duggan, and helps autistic kids get “a better education” and a “chance to be more functional young adults when they graduate high school.”
“There is an enormous amount of unmet needs that can be addressed through digital technologies,” said Stanford University’s Dennis Wall, a pediatrician and principle investigator for the Autism Glass Project, a collaboration between Google and Stanford University.
U.S. families wait 13-18 months to get an autism diagnosis. During that time, “the kids who are waiting on these lists are waiting during periods when therapy has a big impact,” he said in an interview.
This speaks of a “numerical disconnect between the number of clinical practitioners who provide things like diagnostic services and therapeutic intervention and the number of individuals who actually need those therapies,” he said. “And that disconnect … is just growing over time.”
Wall believes technology can address this issue and others, such as clinical standards, and benchmark data that define therapeutic intervention. And he aims to use Autism Glass to streamline and accelerate diagnosis to reach more people and provide therapeutic intervention outside the clinic.
Jena Daniels, clinical research coordinator at The Wall Lab (L) watches Julian Brown point to images, used in an emotion recognition exercise, that would appear on Google Glass glasses in Stanford, California, June 22, 2016. (AP)
Using a mobile app to collect information, researchers can “act on those data very quickly, far faster than what happens in terms of the time within a clinical diagnostic center today,” he said.
“The Glass is actually worn by the children,” he explained. “They look out to the world around them, they find faces and convert those faces into data that can in turn be converted into an emotion and that emotion is fed back to the child instantaneously. And so rather than leveraging flashcards, they’re working within their own natural environment to increasingly understand what faces are telling them.”
The program, still in development, is being tested in several homes to measure gains in social understanding.
“What we’ve learned so far,” said Wall, “is that it functions very robustly in two different ways. One is the children will wear it … and number two is that the emotional feedback that they’re getting from the device is teaching them quite a bit more about their social surroundings, and they have the ability to … learn on their own.”
This is a far cry from when Duggan’s son was first diagnosed with autism – 26 years ago. At the time, she was told autistic children don’t use computers and that she needed to create communication tools to help her child process the spoken language that is often “transient” for autistic children.
“The only thing that he related to were pictures,” she said. “So I created everything visual for him. Everything I taught him had to be done visual and had to be broken down into little steps, which meant I had to create a picture for every single step. And once he learned it, then he learned the task.”
As the child’s vocabulary expanded, so did the flash cards. The process became cumbersome, time-consuming and frustrating for both teacher and student.
That is a “very limited” approach, said Wall, and one that cannot be done at scale. And flash card messages “don’t have the inherent variability that exists in the natural world that the kid lives in. In other words, not every happy face looks the same.”
To simplify the process, Technology for Autism Now, which looks for innovative solutions to help the autism community, developed AutiKnow, an app for non-verbal children who need visual support to understand the spoken language. The app lets teachers take pictures that go into the child’s library on their device and are available on demand.
Duggan said technology firms can do more and play a huge role in providing smart devices and home monitoring systems, and jobs to autistic children who come of age – an important step toward ending social isolation. But first, they must talk with parents of autistic children to understand their needs because not all available technologies are designed with an understanding of autism therapies and goals.
But the future is likely to be brighter. Wall hopes mobile, wearable devices, machine learning, and virtual and augmented reality technologies will facilitate learning and provide therapeutic intervention outside the clinic, not just for autism, but for other developmental conditions as well.
Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.
A Google carpet is seen at the entrance of the new headquarters of Google France before its official inauguration in Paris, France, Dec. 6, 2011. (Reuters)
Two people Google turned down for employment filed a lawsuit in California a year ago, claiming they were rejected because they were both over 40. Now, a San Jose federal court is being asked to determine if others who were also rejected because of their age can join a class action suit. Google reportedly receives as many as two million job applications each year.
Internet security firm Kaspersky Lab says the number of Android users falling victim to ransomware hackers has nearly quadrupled since last year. While ransomware has traditionally targeted PCs, encrypting files and demanding ransom, the mobile ransomware Kaspersky researchers detected, called Fusob, was responsible for 56 percent of the attacks. Fusob is disguised as a multimedia player and downloads when users visit porn websites.
Saudi Arabia is going high-tech as part of a safety drive during the annual Muslim pilgrimage (hajj) to the holy city of Mecca. More than 2,000 people were crushed last September as pilgrims converged on an intersection near Mecca. The new plan will give all pilgrims GPS-connected electronic bracelets that will provide information and directions. The bracelets will also save personal and medical data to help locate and identify individuals in need of medical care or assistance.
Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.
Britain’s biggest technology company – Vodafone – could move its headquarters out of Britain after the country’s vote to exit the European Union. The move is contingent on understanding the future relationship between the U.K. and the EU. The telecom retains 13,000 employees in the U.K. A spokesman said Britain’s EU membership was an important factor in the growth of companies like Vodafone. Some tech companies are now looking to Dublin, Ireland, as an alternative home.
Security analysts and bug-hunters at Google’s “project zero” team found critical vulnerabilities in Symantec and Norton security products. The flaws, which affect a program that unpacks compressed files, allow hackers to compromise a computer by emailing it malicious, self-replicating code.
Running Windows 10? Microsoft’s next major upgrade to the operating system will be coming on August 2. Microsoft says the update will include new features and security upgrades, as well as various improvements.
Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.
FILE – Humanoid robots dressed in the colors of Germany’s and Brazil’s national soccer team jerseys hold the official 2014 World Cup soccer ball during a photo opportunity at the Institute for Computer Science at the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany, June 18, 2014. (Reuters)
For the first time, students at Pakistan’s National University of Science and Technology will participate in the annual RoboCup tournament, held this year in Leipzig, Germany, June 30–July 4. The Pakistani ‘team’ of six humanoid robots was purchased from France, costing about $17,000 each.
The new surveillance measures, approved by Russia’s lower house of parliament, are part of a wide-ranging anti-terrorism law and will allow authorities to demand access to encrypted devices. Telecoms will also have to store metadata and message content for six months. The metadata alone will have to be stored for up to three years, making it possible for the state to access the information at will.
Market analysis done by Canalys predicts that China will have more than 1.4 billion smartphones by 2020. That’s on top of an additional 34 million mobile phones, whose users have not upgraded yet. Canalys attributes the increase to developments in the mobile payments sector, and activity on online shopping sites and social networks. By comparison, in the U.S. smartphone usage is projected to reach 332 million in 2020, with only 5 million mobile phones remaining.
Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.
